Dear friends

Another Christmas to reaffirm the joys of family, of fellowship, and the individual bonds between us that form those threads from which the whole fabric of human society is woven.

I thank you for your support and friendship over this past year, and wish you every happiness and comfort for the year that is to come.

As a gesture of goodwill, I attach a very short Christmas story I wrote some years ago: A Last Nowell. It’s very much drawn from the life, and is one of the pieces included in Growing Up & Other Stories, the very first eBook I successfully published this year.

I hope you like it, and accept my warmest good wishes for the Season and 2014.

Sincerely

Anthony.

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As you enter the exhibition of 120 Aboriginal bark paintings at the National Museum of Australia ... a profoundly beautiful showing of work by artists properly entitled 'Old Masters' ... there is a quotation on the wall (and also in the catalogue) from one of them, Narritjin Maymuru of Eastern Arnhem Land:

Through paintings I will teach you first the surface stories... The deeper meanings I hold in my hands.

It is certainly true that the initial response of any visitor is to be caught up in the sheer power and eloquence of such representations from northern Australia of animal, human and spirit figures...

The lightning man, rainbow serpent, crocodile, kangaroo, emu, turtle and mimi spirits...

painted in ochres upon the .........